Sometimes, when she walked by, she could swear she heard him talking to himself in there. She had thus inferred that he was a nervous, somewhat jumpy individual who got uncomfortable around people, though he was friendly enough, and almost excruciatingly polite.
“Yes, Miss Merlo. I believe she’s awake, as well; should I let the Captain know to expect you?” He also tended to be much more talkative over the com than in person, and obviously tried hard to be helpful to his shipmates, though she did wish he’d stop putting the “Miss” in front of her name like she’d requested. It was hard not to snort in amusement every time she heard it; in Arlesian culture, “Miss” was reserved for older, married women.
“Sure, why not.” She could also just walk down there and ask for entry on her own, but figured she’d let him have that one.
“Will do. Excellent timing on that jump, by the way.” The com system clicked off before she could respond to the compliment, though she smiled as she started walking.
Since Mr. Leonard was a bit (well, much more than a bit) of a shut-in, that had left her and Captain Branwen to keep each other company during the often pretty uneventful days of flight between jumps and ports. She supposed that they’d become friends, by now, though she didn’t honestly know how other people outside the military measured that. And besides, could someone truly be friends with their commanding officer?
She shook her head at some of those lingering thoughts. The Captain seemed to try to be friends, though Merlo knew there was probably a lot of ground she still had to cover with her, a lot of story still untold. For instance, she knew the Captain came from Fade, a rather startlingly primitive planet in the Chimera cluster.
She didn’t know why Branwen had left or how she got here, except that it had something to do with her military service, and maybe her family. She didn’t even know how old the woman was; she’d asked, but simply been told with a reflective smile that it was a “pretty long story.” The Captain hadn’t seemed to feel like talking about it, though, so she’d let it drop and not brought it back up since.
Otherwise, however, Captain Branwen was pretty open and comradely with her. She couldn’t begrudge the woman not spilling all of her secrets to a relative stranger after a month or so, even if they had been trapped in the same can for most of it with just one other person. It wasn’t as if she’d felt comfortable pouring out the entirety her life story as of yet, either.
It was good to have someone she could talk to, though. The Captain could tell some pretty interesting stories when she felt like it, which was common over dinner, and knew about a lot of really primitive stuff that Merlo couldn’t really wrap her head around. On the other hand, the Captain seemed to only know the basics about space and even less about things like space travel. Perhaps they might be better friends if they had more in common, but they literally came from utterly different worlds. Or stations, in Merlo’s case.
It was a short walk to the Captain’s quarters, and would have been shorter still if she wasn’t feeling so damned introspective today. She rapped an armored knuckle on the panel beside the Captain's door once, and the small, raised rectangle lit up in recognition with a dull sapphire glow. The panels were at an oddly low height, fine for her, but low enough the Captain had to stoop a bit and even Mr. Leonard to lean down ever so slightly.
The Captain had unfortunately said that where she got the ship was more of Mr. Leonard’s story to tell than hers, which was apparently some sort of Fade cultural taboo, so Merlo still didn’t know much about the Destiny’s origins. Or why some stuff in it was kinda odd, like the height of the door panels. Wherever Mr. Leonard had found this vessel, it was obvious that the Destiny Abounds hadn’t been made with anyone of Branwen’s stature in mind.
A muffled voice sounded from within; probably a permission to enter, since the door slid smoothly open an instant later. Captain Branwen sat inside, leaning over a desk, brushing wisps of blond out of her face as she swiped awkwardly through a glowing datapad: one of those ubiquitous, durable, cheap-to-mass-produce devices that served as most people’s computing and communication interfaces. They were generally unimpressive by Merlo’s standards, but she’d already seen more extravagant variants, some with holographic interfaces that projected their screens from the tiniest metal bases, and some that could be worn or even implanted. But Branwen generally preferred the sturdy, solid, simple pads like the one she was peering down into just now. Probably going over ship inventory, or trade routes, or maybe just information about the worlds in the cluster; the Captain was constantly trying to learn more about “things beyond the sky,” and, in one sense, was nearly as much of an outsider here as Merlo was.
“Hold a moment,” Branwen gestured for her to wait, looking up from her pad at Merlo, silhouetted as she occupied the exit into the hall. “I was just preparing to go get something to eat when I, um, felt us arrive.” Slipjumps always made the Captain ill, even if Merlo executed them perfectly; she’d tried. “All is well, I assume?”
Merlo crossed her arms behind her back, standing just outside the doorway, in a military posture if not with military rigidity. “Yeah, no problems. I figure we’re about three and a half, maybe four days out from docking.”
Branwen grinned jovially up at her, leaning back in her chair and away from the datapad. “It is madness to me. I know you are skilled, and the Destiny is fast, but I still cannot fathom it. We will make some fair coin at all of this, yet! I still remember my first jumps, and it taking hours for the pilot to get both their bearings and a solid control over the ship. Then a week or so to actually make planet fall.”
Merlo couldn't help noticing how the Captain still said “planetfall” as if it were two words. She’d also had a hard time believing it took most pilots that long to regain control of their ships; taking that long meant the velocity of exiting the slip could randomly send them halfway to just about anywhere in a star system, but she’d asked around at star ports and found it to be quite true.
It just proved that she really was that good of a pilot.
“Hold a moment, let me seek out the pad with our delivery locations on it.” Merlo didn’t know why Branwen kept different data on different pads instead of consolidating it all onto a single personal one, but the Captain got up to rummage around on her nightstand nonetheless. Merlo nodded silently, still standing more or less at attention while she looked off down the corridor and waited, some stray thoughts still directed inward.
A few seconds later, the Captain found the correct pad and rose triumphantly to her feet, brandishing it and crossing the distance between her bed and the door in a couple of long strides and passing a curious Merlo on her way into the hall beyond. “Come. We can discuss it over a hot plate.” Merlo fell into step behind the Captain with unthinking obedience, though she nodded, her stomach agreeing with idea of lunch anyway.
They walked together down the hall and stepped through the open archway designating the moderately-sized open kitchen area. With a sense of silent community, Captain Branwen got dishes, made from some strange, durable organic matter, out of the higher cabinets; meanwhile, Merlo gathered up some of the canned goods stocked from their last port planetside and popped them open. In the Destiny’s dining area, a sleek rectangle of a table and its attendant chairs made from the same seamless metal as everything else that was a part of the vessel shared the room with a set of cabinets both high and low. Along the wall, a long, ergonomic counter was lined with various devices dealing with the warming, preparing, or cold storage of foodstuffs.
The pair settled their lunch at one end of the long table, Branwen taking the end seat, as usual. They had liberally deposited a couple of the sealed metal canisters of what the Captain referred to as “a chicken” and “root vegetables” onto their plates, and Merlo settled herself to dig in. The food was pretty good stuff, actually; the Captain had complained at one point that she wished that there was a bit more variety in their diets thus far, but Merlo couldn't complain. It was better than n
utrient paste every day.
Merlo, of course, ate nearly twice what her captain did, something her companion no longer batted an eye at. The Captain had teased her once about docking her pay to account for all the extra food, but Merlo was pretty sure the older woman was kidding. Though, really, she didn’t much care either way, as long as she had a place to stay where she was sure to keep flying and eating.
“So, whatcha reading?” Merlo queried her captain around a juicy, semi-stuffed mouthful of whatever-this-deliciousness-was. Spending a meal or sharing a room in comfortable silence wasn’t odd for them at this point, but Merlo hadn’t really seen the Captain since yesterday’s dinner, and more felt the need to up the level of connection. Or maybe it had something to do with her level of introspection, instead. She’d noticed that she’d rather have people around to talk to than not, most days.
“At the moment? About Nygotha.” The Captain’s various datapads lay scattered randomly over her end of the table, glowing softly in near-harmony with one another and taking their respective places around her plate and the overly large “tankard” she drank from. She currently gripped one of the pads with an air of seeming interest etched into her face, an expression of curiosity that Merlo saw often enough to be pretty familiar with. She looked up at Merlo, simultaneously lifting another, smaller pad and sliding it past her food and across the uneven, black cloth covering the table and into Merlo’s waiting grasp. “That one contains the locations for our current endeavor, both port cities. Which cargo is meant for the moon they marked, and what is meant for the planet’s surface should be in a separate page.”
Merlo, by now, was fairly good at translating the Captain’s technologically deficient descriptions, possibly because she’d had to leave behind most of the terms and tech she was personally familiar with upon the death of the Defiance, anyway. She grunted in affirmation to the Captain; she’d deal with the cargo manifest after lunch. It’d be something to keep her busy.
She absently slapped the little metal-framed pad to the small of her back for later (carefully, though; some of the tech in this cluster was as fragile as its residents), and her Arlesian bodysuit quickly formed a pocket for it, the layers upon layers of military-grade nanotech sealing comfortably over most of its surface to hold it securely in place. “Negotha, huh? What, or where, is that?” Branwen never really gave the blue and black of Merlo’s ultra high-tech suit a second glance past their first few days together, a sure signal of how unfamiliar she was with such things. Nothing like it existed in this cluster that Merlo had seen, and she’d already learned not to show off its capabilities around much of anyone without being prepared to draw eyes.
“No, no. Ny-gotha, not Nee-gotha. At least from what this says.” The Captain raised a blond brow while she eyeballed Merlo over her next ample bite telling Merlo that this, once again, was one of those things that she probably should pretend to have already heard about. The Captain never seemed to mind though, and never pried; perhaps she thought it would be hypocritical.
“That’s correct, Captain!” Mr. Leonard’s pleasant voice came unbidden from the recesses of the com system, a not-so-uncommon occurrence. “If I’m not mistaken, its name is drawn from… Yes. It has an ancient Altairan mythological basis, the name very loosely translating to ‘nothing’ or perhaps ‘void.’ There was historically a bit of an academic disagreement over the intricacies of the full meaning, but, as you can see, the spirit of it does seem to be appropriate.”
Branwen nodded, her mouth still full and chewing, so Merlo asked the obvious. “How so?” Silence momentarily greeted her question, Mr. Leonard no doubt waiting on Branwen, and the Captain waiting on processing her food.
The Captain gestured with her eyes and made a slight circle in the air with her fork for a moment before becoming unburdened enough to reply. “It is an interesting tale, to be honest.” She paused and swallowed, making a vague gesture towards the com’s speakers in the meanwhile. “I am certain Mr. Leonard already knows about it, as it is one of the big mysteries of our cluster.” Merlo focused her attention on her Captain as she continued. “The jump to the Nygotha system was discovered by Altair long ago. Its slip branches off of the midpoint of the jump to the Elysian and Niallassian systems, so you can safely bypass it, which is what most almost everyone does.”
“Why? What’s in it?” Merlo’s curiosity was getting the better of her.
“Nothing,” Branwen replied, smiling with her storyteller’s expression.
“Nothing?” Merlo queried, and Branwen nodded in partial response to her question while simultaneously taking another bite of her meal. Merlo furrowed her brow. “You mean, like an uninhabitable system, or just a star with no orbiting planetoids, or what?”
“Well, they say it used to be an inhabited system, possibly hundreds of years ago, with about the same level of technology Altair has now. Three to four of those ‘garden worlds’ used to be in the system, but now the remnants of those planets and everything else in the solar system float throughout, torn asunder by some grave force and now utterly lifeless. They say you can still find remnants of cities anchored in some of the debris.”
Merlo munched consideringly for a moment, then said “You mean like explosions or something? Like the fusion weapons that messed up that one planet?”
“No, nothing like Jiraxi, which is still intact, still inhabited. They say these worlds, and indeed all the solar bodies save the Nygothan star itself, seem to have been ripped apart by some great, external force,” Branwen intoned with a mystical, storyteller’s mien, first looking down at her datapad, then back up at Merlo as if to gauge her reaction. The Captain kept her own expression amused, but still playfully mysterious.
“What? You’re shitting me.” Merlo reached out for Branwen’s datapad, skepticism scrawled openly across her face.
“I do not jest,” Branwen protested with a smile. She rose slightly and leaned forward, handing off the pad with the information in question and settling back down to eat more. Merlo scanned it quickly, disbelief melting from her face as her eyes widened in a measure of surprise.
“Indeed, Miss Merlo,” Mr. Leonard’s cheerful voice offered helpfully from the wall panel above them, “It’s no joke. As far as I’m aware, no comprehensive scientific explanation has ever been offered for whatever phenomenon stripped the life from Nygotha, though there are countless theories.” Merlo supposed that with Mr. Leonard’s help, the Captain could have rigged the datapad with this as a prank, but she didn’t know if that was the kind of thing either of them would do. Besides that, a quick Exonet search revealed far, far too much confirming information for it to be a reasonable practical joke.
“Wow. Huh.” Merlo shrugged with indifference at her own perceived lack of eloquence. Branwen was still grinning broadly at her as Merlo transferred ownership of the datapad back to her Captain, and the young Arlesian realized that Branwen had probably been waiting for her to show enough interest to warrant diving into the story.
“The rumors, many of which are, of course, not rooted in any manner of science, range from strange gravitational distortions, to massive slipjump anomalies, to colossal alien creatures with unknown powers,” Mr. Leonard continued. “But, if you’d like to know, the thing I find most interesting about the system is the star, Nygotha-890. It’s a blue dwarf: a classification of star our galaxy is dated as too young to have produced by this point in time.”
“See, that is exactly the kind of tale I enjoy hearing,” Branwen said, gesturing indicatively with her eating utensil toward the com, as if it were actually a person involved in the conversation. Merlo couldn’t help but notice how brightly the royal blue of her eyes flickered with life as she delved into the discussion with her usual gusto. “Not that I understand the significance of all that star-age science, but I do so love the mystery inherent in it. It could be anything.”
The sleek com panel made a slight noise as it rendered Mr. Leonard’s voice once again with clear, digital precision. “I’d be mo
re than happy to attempt to explain it once more, or to explain any solar phenomenon in general, at a time of your convenience, Captain.”
The Captain nodded as Merlo watched, and she wondered if the Captain ever thought back over their conversations and realized that there was no way Mr. Leonard could possibly see her body language. “Niallasi remains another one,” Branwen noted, gesturing towards Merlo. “Do you know that one?”
Merlo shook her head, not bothering to continue the charade of familiarity at this point. She was pretty sure the Captain could see right through it, and besides, this conversation was both interesting and useful. She’d need to know stuff like this to make her way in this cluster. She didn’t know yet what she was going to do with her nebulous future, but for now, the Destiny was a damn good place to be.
“Niallasi is a garden planet, just shy of the standard size, in the Arden system,” Branwen began, seemingly partly reading from her pad and partly speaking from previous study on the matter. “From what Altairan and Kepo scientists have been able to determine, Niallasi appears to have been terraformed at some point in the past, and its planetary core somehow reinforced. Its surface is about half land, half water, and has a comfortable temperature that barely varies over the course of the year. It only contains a handful of large cities, which are populated entirely by several thousands of children, ranging in approximate age from four to eleven.”
Merlo coughed out a small mouthful of her beverage, wiping her mouth with her arm and rising, with Branwen already offering her datapad across the table and flashing her teeth in an amused smirk at Merlo’s expense. “When first I heard of these places, I believe I made quite a similar expression,” she said with a low, honest chuckle.
“I just think you wanna see how dumb I look when you shock me with something,” Merlo grumbled back playfully. She perused the datapad once again, silvery eyes tinted a lambent blue by the soft hues emitted from it. “I don’t get it; I mean, how does a planet full of children work? There’s more to it, right?”
Destiny Abounds (Starlight Saga Book 1) Page 4
